1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to systems for monitoring vehicles. More specifically, the invention relates to a multi-featured system for monitoring the status of vehicles, detecting certain alarm conditions, monitoring the location of vehicles, and providing a variety of communication and control functions relating to the vehicles.
2. Related Art
The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that a vehicle theft occurs somewhere in the United States every 20 seconds. The National Auto Theft Bureau (NATB) estimates that one of every 42 vehicles in the United States is stolen or broken into, or has parts, contents, or accessories stolen, resulting in an estimated loss of over $9 billion per year. Law enforcement officials concede that theft of the vehicle and its contents is one of the easiest crimes to commit, and one of the most difficult to prevent and solve. Authorities estimate that an experienced auto thief can break into almost any vehicle in as little as six seconds, regardless of whether or not it has an alarm system. On average, fewer than one in five of the vehicles stolen in the United States is recovered and the thief prosecuted. Clearly, known alarm systems do not stop determined, experienced motor vehicle thieves.
Various anti-theft devices are known in the art. The simplest devices take the form of physical restraints, such as door locks, steering wheel bars, or wheel locks. More sophisticated systems involve passive alarms that activate automatically when the driver leaves the car.
More recently, electronic homing devices have been developed that can track a vehicle, but only after it is reported stolen. After the vehicle is discovered to be stolen and reported to police, the police are able to track and capture the thief, provided the vehicle owner and the police have both invested in special communications devices. In addition to being useful only after the vehicle is reported stolen, these systems are useful only in the geographical areas where the corresponding police receivers are located. Moreover, these systems are in some cases prohibitively expensive.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to provide a cost-effective automatic vehicle theft detection device which immediately alerts the police to the theft, allowing them to track the vehicle over a wide geographic area.
On a related matter, breakdowns, accidents, and medical and other emergencies in a motor vehicle may arise. Clearly, it is desirable to be able to quickly and conveniently report the emergency occurrence and request appropriate assistance. For example, it is desirable to contact a wrecker, ambulance, fire truck, or police as needed, and indicate the exact location where assistance is needed. The presence of citizens band radios or cellular telephones has increased, but these systems suffer from shortcomings such as the inability to accurately relay the vehicle's position.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to provide a system which can quickly summon appropriate vehicles such as a wrecker, ambulance, fire truck, or police, and reliably and accurately communicate the location where the assistance is needed.
On still another related issue, companies such as courier services and freight hauling firms have always had a need for tracking the vehicles in their fleets. By tracking the fleet vehicles, a dispatcher knows which vehicle is the most appropriate one to send to a next location, thus improving overall fleet efficiency. It is desirable to provide information on the status of each vehicle in the fleet, such as whether it is moving, parked, or disabled. This comprehensive information allows the dispatcher to use an existing fleet to its greatest advantage, thereby providing better service to the company's customers. Unfortunately, known fleet monitoring systems have often involved two-way voice communications depending on the dispatcher's communication with a large number of drivers, resulting in less than optimum efficiency and reliability.
Therefore, there is a need in the art to provide a fleet tracking system which provides a dispatcher with continuously updated comprehensive information about the variety of vehicles in a fleet.
The present invention provides a vehicle tracking and security system which overcomes the shortcomings of the known systems.